What “Sunrise 2027” actually refers to

GS1 Sunrise 2027 is the retail industry’s coordinated target date for point-of-sale scanners to be able to read 2D barcodes — specifically GS1 Digital Link QR codes and GS1 DataMatrix — in addition to the traditional 1D UPC/EAN barcodes they’ve always scanned. It is not a hard regulatory deadline in the way a legal compliance date would be; it’s an industry-coordinated readiness target, meaning individual retailers move at their own pace, but the direction is set and major retailers are actively rolling out 2D-capable scanning.

Why this is happening at all

A traditional EAN/UPC barcode encodes exactly one thing: a product number. A GS1 Digital Link QR code can encode that same product number plus a URL, batch/lot number, expiration date, and serial number — all in the same symbol, scannable by both a POS scanner and a consumer’s phone camera. That unlocks things a 1D barcode structurally cannot: a phone-scannable link to product information, recall-relevant batch tracking at the point of sale, and expiration-date-aware inventory rotation, all without adding a second barcode to the package.

What actually changes for a business preparing for this

Your product identifier itself doesn’t change. A GTIN issued today is the same GTIN encoded in a future GS1 Digital Link barcode — Sunrise 2027 is about how it’s encoded and scanned, not about renumbering products.

Your barcode symbol does change, eventually. Moving from a 1D EAN/UPC to a GS1 Digital Link QR code is a packaging and label-artwork change, not just a software setting. This is the lead-time-heavy part: packaging redesigns, printer/artwork approval cycles, and retailer-specific compliance requirements all take real time, which is exactly why this is a multi-year runway rather than a single flag-day cutover.

Your labeling and data systems need to be able to generate the new format correctly. A GS1 Digital Link URI has a specific, standardized structure — a base URL plus path segments for the GTIN and any additional Application Identifiers (batch/lot, expiration, serial), encoded correctly enough that both a POS scanner reading it as a GTIN and a phone reading it as a regular URL both work from the same code. Generating this correctly by hand, per SKU, does not scale — it needs to come from the same system of record that already manages your product and batch data.

Where to actually start

The lowest-risk starting point is decoupling “what data needs to go on the label” from “how it’s currently encoded” in whatever system generates your labels today. If batch number, expiration date, and GTIN already live in a structured data source (an ERP, a MES, a spreadsheet with a defined schema) rather than being manually typed per label, adding a GS1 Digital Link encoding alongside your existing barcode is primarily a template and printing-logic change — not a data-migration project. If that data currently lives only in someone’s head or a printed batch record, that’s the actual prerequisite work, independent of any barcode format.